Posts Tagged Under: NVIDIA

Last year was an amazing one for AMD, with the company releasing a slew of extremely successful new CPUs based on the Zen architecture. This year is getting off to a decent start as well—with a new line of Ryzen CPUs with integrated Vega graphics processors (the R3 2200G and R5 2400G) being launched earlier this week. In this article, we will look at how well these freshly released processors fare against Intel’s integrated graphics, Nvidia’s low-budget GT 1030, and AMD’s own earlier APU integrated graphics.

After some very brief relief around the 2017 holidays, graphics card prices continue on the path of going absolutely insane.

We had a cryptocoin-induced inflation back in late 2013, but it was somewhat mild, and only lasted a couple of months. We had a second inflation in 2017, where the price hikes were higher, and lasted more than half a year. When this ended in December 2017, I thought: “Thank goodness that is over. Nothing could have been as bad as that!”

I was so naive, so wrong.

In short, there is not much we can do about graphics cards prices other than continue to recommend the best graphics cards at each price point. However, we want to be realistic about how bad the situation has gotten.

What a year it has been for us builders! Many have been hailing this as one of the best years ever. But is that indicative of the overall hype that has been thrown around over the course of 2017? Read on as I look back on the year that was 2017, and evaluate how the biggest releases have stacked up against their hype.

Christmas is just around the corner, and incredible sales are undoubtedly coming. If you haven’t been following the PC building scene for the past year or two, then some things may seem daunting at first. For instance: What’s up with crazy high RAM prices? And why are some CPUs and graphics cards out of stock?

If you’re planning to build a new PC this Christmas, then there are some important things to know about. Consider this your Christmas 2017 PC hardware shopping guide.

The GTX 1070 Ti is here. As a graphics card that falls somewhere in-between the GTX 1070 and 1080 in terms of both performance and price, it’s a little curious of a release from NVIDIA… Until you consider the competition.

Back in August, AMD finally released their long-awaited RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 graphics cards, meant to compete with NVIDIA’s high-end Pascal GPUs. The general conclusion was that it was too little too late, with poor availability at launch to further spoil the few positives with the cards. Vega 56 was the more interesting out of the two, offering better performance for a slightly higher price compared to the GTX 1070.

The GTX 1070 Ti is NVIDIA’s answer to RX Vega 56, but it also raises a number of questions related to the $400-$500 graphics card price range.

So, how does the 1070 Ti fair against the competition? Let’s investigate.

AMD’s RX Vega, the gaming version of AMD’s long-awaited high-end GPU architecture, finally saw its release this month. While RX Vega 56, the smaller brother of the full Vega GPU, offered great price-to-performance compared to NVIDIA’s price-equivalent GTX 1070, the story is different with RX Vega 64 when comparing it to its price-equivalent, the GTX 1080.

AMD first mentioned the Vega GPU architecture over a year ago, even before the launch of its Polaris graphics cards. It was slated for an early 2017 release, but due to mysterious circumstances was pushed back and back, theoretically coming to market in late June with a Titan X-style Frontier Edition — a prosumer Vega GPU-based graphics card starting at $999.

Now, it’s mid-August, and AMD has finally released the gaming-oriented RX Vega 64, with its smaller brother Vega 56 coming on the 28th of August. But how do they compare to the current competition, the GTX 1070 and 1080? Let’s find out.

Just two weeks following its official announcement, the GTX 1080 Ti has launched at $700, replacing the Titan X Pascal on the highest end of our graphics card recommendations. Simply put: It is the new king of graphics cards, inching out ahead of the $1,200 Titan X in overall gaming performance. On average, the new 1080 Ti is 2-3% faster than the Titan X, while priced $500 lower.

We have added the 1080 Ti to our GPU recommendations in the Exceptional, Enthusiast, Extremist, and Monstrous tiers on our homepage.

For a new PC builder or a person out of the hardware loop for a few years, choosing a new monitor may prove to be fairly difficult. These days, dynamic refresh rate technology, which syncs your monitor’s refresh rate to your graphics card’s output, plays a big role in choosing a monitor.

The two big contenders in dynamic refresh rate technology are AMD’s FreeSync and NVIDIA’s G-Sync. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, which we’ll try to address in detail in this article.